Quotes from Maggie O'Farrell

He feels as though he is caught in a web of absence, its strings and tendrils ready to stick and cling to him, whichever way he turns.

She doesn't like sitting about, no matter what is wrong in life. It does you good to have something ahead of you, regardless how small.

Esme began playing the game she often played with herself at times like this, looking over the room and working out how she might get round it without touching the floor. She could climb from the sofa to the low table and, from there, to the fender stool. Along that and then—

We are, all of us, wandering about in a state of oblivion, borrowing our time, seizing our days, escaping our fates, slipping through loopholes, unaware of when the axe may fall. As Thomas Hardy writes of Tess Durbeyfield, 'There was another date . . . that of her own death; a day which lay sly and unseen among all the other days of the year, giving no sign or sound when she annually passed over it; but not the less surely there. When was it?

What do you think, Father said, and I said, she is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, and she was, she was—

The words fly out of her mouth, like hornets, words she didn't even know she knew, words that dart and crackle and maim, words that twist and mangle her tongue.

There is, she has found, great power to be had in silence.

After he had sailed around the Mediterranean in 1869, Mark Twain said that travel was 'fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness'.

the time I spent in hospital is the hinge on which my childhood swung.

one of those terrifying rows where suddenly an end you never thought would come rears up in front of you, like a cliff edge you weren't aware of.

Mother and Father had said one night, just before my wedding, that her name would not be mentioned again and that they would thank me if I would act accordingly. And I did, act accordingly, that is, although I thought about her a great deal more than they realised. So I pulled out the letters and—

May I keep this?" It was not a question. He was already turning away, placing her miniature painting inside his leather book and tying the straps, so that the bird could never fly away again, even if it had lived.

Had she been too hard on her as a girl? Was that why she'd grown up so fearful, somehow, so reluctant to make her way in the world?

we were both trying to see the people we had been, those ghost selves who no longer existed, those able-bodied bipeds who never thought twice about the miracle of independent movement, who had been swallowed inside the sessile, atrophied beings we now were. I

And there is a soreness to her body, it aches, her head feels softened, muzzy. She has acquired a disturbingly acute sense of smell. The odour of print from a magazine someone is reading across a room can oppress her. She knows what will be on their plates at lunch just from sniffing the air. She can walk down the middle of the ward and can tell who has bathed this week and who has not.

Sadness keeps attempting to tie weights to her wrists and ankles, therefore she has to keep moving, she has to outpace it. And so she walks, along one terrace then another, from one battlement to the next

A bee drones by, scribbling on the air near their heads...

Holding my child, I realised my vulnerability to death: I was frightened of it, for the first time. I knew all too well how fine a membrane separates us from that place, and how easily it can be perforated. —

And she holds the photograph. She holds it in her hands. She looks at it and she knows.

Will you listen to yourself, she said to him, and added, eejit, just loud enough for him to hear. When I looked back at him I saw that he was looking at her, I saw the way it was, that he might dissolve like sugar in water, and when I saw this I—

When he took my hand he taught me something about the value of touch, the communicative power of the human hand.

En aquel momento no se lo conté a nadie, ni a mis amigos ni a mi familia: no encontraba la manera de traducir lo sucedido a gramática y sintaxis.

The people who teach us something retain a particularly vivid place in our memories. I'd been a parent for about ten minutes when I met the man, but he taught me, with a small gesture, one of the most important things about the job: kindness, intuition, touch, and that sometimes you don't even need words.

younger women as they pass us in the street, with their cigarettes, their makeup, their tight-seamed dresses, their tiny handbags, their smooth, washed hair, and we turn away, we put down our heads, we keep on pushing the pram up the hill.